Always Her
She stares at me. Me on my knees in the muggy, warm grass of summer. She stares at me and I wave at her. The friendly wave of a child who has no boundaries to making friends with strangers. The wave of a child who has not yet felt the societal pressures of fitting in or fitting out. One who has no style, nothing to conform to, nothing to conform against.
She stands still, quiet, hands dropped to her side like she’s forgotten about them. A light cloud of gnats flies between us and she blinks. I voice a greeting to her in my child voice. I speak to her my name and ask her hers. She comes over and kneels. Her pale knees touch the same patch of grass that mine have settled in, creating similar dents in the moist earth beneath us.
Two pairs of knees kneeling in my front yard next to my myriad of items. I see her curious look at them spread out before us. My specimens. My curiosity collection. Jars full of curious things for a curious child in a world where there are no more mysteries. I want to open them one by one. I hesitate over what to show her first. Which curiosity to share with her. To find out what this newcomer into my world is prepared to experience.
I choose a jar I know well, with what I consider a secret inside. The tips of my thumb and finger gently pluck the curiosity from its jar. My fingers are clean despite my afternoon outside as I’ve been licking them when they become dirty, to avoid getting any smudges on my items and ruining the purity they hold for me. My fingers are adept and handle this curiosity gently. A smooth dark onyx eye polished and round with a white iris, lidless and unblinking. She looks over it, leaning in slightly, then holds out her hand, palm-lines tinged with dirt. I gingerly placed my curiosity into her hand. Into her unclean palm with grit and grime. I accept this with her, that she is unclean, and some of her uncleanness may transfer to my stone and stay behind when she is gone. I felt calm inside at the thought of this. I could see the want in her eyes. Children and adults are both the same in this respect, it is very difficult for them to hide the hunger of wanting from their eyes. I told her it was hers to keep. I knew this meant I would not keep a piece of her when she goes, but I wanted her for more than just a moment. I told her this made us friends now, bonding us in a moment of unselfishness. Of creative and spontaneous gift giving with the un-worry of the value of what is being given that adults lack the grace of.
I was being called inside to return indoors. The voice of my parent sliding across the humidity of the grass to find me. I closed my jar no longer holding its curiosity. I carefully gathered them together using my shirt as a makeshift basket. Their glass tinkling against one another with semi-hollow sounds, lids clacking dully together. I told her I would play with her later. In a flash, like an eel slipping through the cracks of an old weir in a lake, her mouth kissed mine in that innocent childish way. Thunder rolled through me for the first time in my life. I would not feel that way again for a very long time. In that moment I tasted dew and I tasted peanut butter. I’m allergic to peanuts.
*
College feels like every Lana Del Rey song played end to end filling up a bubble around you until it bursts. Everyone looks a little better, everyone smells a little better in their own way. They have grown into the limbs that they developed first before their minds expanded and started to provide them with new pathways for thinking and feeling. The focus of each body being sex, food, and future. With all being uncertainties during this time. Minds have us convinced we know who we are and who we are going to be and for many of us, what we are going to do.
I wander listlessly across campus most days, I don’t have a full day of classes like most students. I look like I don’t belong if I am not hustling across pavement focused on not being late. I have time to feel the sun on my skin and feel it warming my dark hair. I have time to notice the different smells of the trees and bushes in the days after it rains. My languid ways attract the eyes of the others who should be too busy to notice other than the fact I stand out by not being in the same mode as they are.
Since I got here I have been looking for one person in particular, someone I hadn’t seen in half a lifetime. For someone in college that isn’t that long, and it is. She and I would play together as much as we could after school and on the weekends. When our families would release us from chores as we got older, we would rush to meet. When we would release ourselves from our friends and after school activities, we would always find one another. Then as we grew older, when we could find time, we would phone. Finally, when we would remember, we would text.
When you are older, even when you are still young but older, you look back and cannot understand how you let important things slip away, or had ideas that contradicted who you are currently. You don’t recognize the self that you were as you are now so markedly changed. It feels as though a haze has settled over the time period of the past, of being a child, a teen. How you could let someone so close to you get so far away, you have no idea.
She moved. Because I was absorbed in a world of my own emotion, fantasy, drama, and creation, I let it happen without so much as a tether to her. When I realized this I felt hurt that she never threw out a line to me either. We had both become something we never thought could be possible: just childhood friends. Someone to use up and forget once you built a world for yourself with new faces, tastes, styles, and adventures. I step by person after person. Face after face, always checking, always scanning their eyes swiftly, even the guys. You never know. I’d love her even if she was he now.
What will I do when I see those brown eyes as dark as my own? Will the air become stifling, too thick to breathe? Will I wilt like flower petals in the heat? I imagine myself evaporating and hanging before her like a clouded mist. When I open my eyes I realize I have lingered too long and am alone. Better to be alone now when I am in my head, when I am imagining her in my mind. I tried to detail my first meeting with her to a guy I once loved. He didn’t understand the attachment to words I have. He didn’t understand how I described her to him. The emotions that dripped from me when I spoke them to him never penetrated his being. I closed my eyes one more time to imagine her as she was when I last recalled seeing her.
She stood so close to me on my birthday. As children we had started having it as “our” birthday, being that we were born close to the same day, while only a year apart in age. We would call ourselves “The Twins”, as in the twins of Gemini. This birthday was my birthday. Our first birthday that was just my own since I had met her. We had started the process of being two people again after so long being one in our childhood. I wanted to be me. Solid. Individual. With my other friends around me. The secrets of her being were something only I knew and only she knew mine.
She was there because I was there. I wanted to have this ritual of life with her, puberty, growing, showing, changing. I wanted her there but I did not see what I was doing to push her away. The first lips to touch mine. The first to know my mind, the only one to ever see what I truly held dear in jars I kept hidden away. It was the last time I really saw her, and the first time I really let her go.
I open my eyes to the startling sunlight and let my vision adjust. In the straining blur I see a figure, standing alone. We are standing alone together, out here among no one. Ready to gather our will and make introductions if we must. I blink back a few tears that have welled up in the dome of my eyes and look again. This hazy outline has solidified into a person. Her. The features are stretched softly, more angular as time has carved them from the soft clay of childhood. Eyes still dark and as brewing as mine. She holds up a hand, a greeting. No, not just a hand, not just a greeting. Between her thumb and finger I can see she is holding something. She rocks it slowly in her fingers, held up in the sun. I can finally see what it is in between her fingers with the sun striking the deep onyx color. A stone polished to a gleaming shine with a white iris looking back at me.
*
Under the shade of a tree that I don’t know the name of we sit. Knees bent in the grass with our legs together pressing down a patch of green blades beneath us, creating a dent in the earth that is our own.
Quinn is a writer from sunny Phoenix, Arizona who is living and writing in drizzly Portland, Oregon. Her education and career are in behavioral health. She’s published short fiction, poetry, and nonfiction in various publications including Dark Sire Literary Magazine, Literally Stories, Friday Flash Fiction, Everyday Fiction, South Broadway Ghost Society, and Rigorous Magazine. She was chosen for the 2024 SSWA x Thumbprint Gallery: A Thousand Words exhibit for her story “The Humid Hours”. She often spends time hanging out with her stinky little dogs Olive and Charlifer, watching movies, and playing video games.